McDonald Is Transforming Its Customer Engagement In The Netherlands, Sweden And Japan, Thanks To Microsoft Azure

Microsoft today highlighted one of its customer success stories in retail and hospitality industry. McDonald’s released new mobile apps in the Netherlands, Sweden and Japan, regions. This mobile app was built by VMob with features such as product information, restaurant locator and mass offers for promotions and specials. When customers open the McDonald’s app, they get individualized content based on their location, the time of day, the weather, and their own habits of purchasing and responding to promotions. Early on a cold, gray morning, the offer might be for coffee or for one of the customer’s favorite breakfast items. If the customer is moving quickly, the offer may point to drive-through locations. As a result, McDonald’s in Sweden has seen a 700 percent increase in offer redemptions, and customers using the app are returning to stores twice as often and spending 47 percent more.

The VMob platform enables far more than a sophisticated mobile app. First, to fuel this customer experience, the platform constantly pulls data from a vast number of digital touch points in addition to users’ devices — weather data, POS terminals, in-store Wi-Fi, and beacons and other sensors that track where customers are in the store, from the sales counter to the drive-through. Then by using Microsoft Azure Blob storage to process vast volumes of data from more than 40 million endpoints in the cloud with Azure Stream Analytics, the platform analyzes customer behavior patterns and responses to offers to ensure that targeted promotions are the most relevant and desirable for the customer. Finally, customized offers are sent back to customers through Azure Notification Hubs, regardless of mobile platform — Windows, Android or iOS. And VMob works with customers’ marketing agencies or in-house teams to provide data for reporting, which can be done through Power BI for Office 365 or fed into customers’ bespoke analytics systems.